No.
The President does not have the power to make laws or set tariffs. Executive Actions are not in the Constitution at all, but courts have allowed the President to use them for things under his control, such as with the bureaucracy. (A good example is when Truman gave an Executive Order integrating the military.)
Executive Orders have expanded over the years, but never to the abusive degree that Trump exercises, with orders that have nothing at all to do with his powers but instead are in essence laws that he is decreeing like some emperor.
So can he do this under the Constitution (you know, that document that he admits he doesn’t know anything about and doesn’t think he has to obey)? No. No again.
But none of that matters if no one stops him. Congress could overrule and ignore 90% of his Executive Actions, and the courts could rule them unconstitutional — but unless they act, he’s going to get away with it all.
Fortunately, some courts have ruled that he isn’t a dictator able to unilaterally issue decrees, but so far, not one Republican has decided that their oaths to defend the Constitution are meaningful compared to their loyalty to Trump. They are as unpatriotic as you can be and are the reason we are in this mess.
Election season is coming up in many states. Be sure to vote against every Republican, no matter what the position, because if they’re still a member of that party after all this, they clearly have no problem with Dictator Trump and every Republican elected just helps to strengthen the party’s power.
I’ve hardly posted here for a while, because politics has just made me so depressed. (I do still rant on Facebook, though)…
The next four years are going to be difficult. Those of us who did not vote for this President are deeply concerned about the direction in which this country is now headed.
Agent Lori Perkins asked herself, “What can I really do?” and created THE BOOK OF EVERYDAY RESISTANCE — a collection of essays about what we can do to resist, how we resist, and why we resist. It includes my essay “Fighting Back.”
She has made the book available for FREE as a kindle download. (The paperback is priced as low as possible to cover costs.) The book has been #1 on Amazon’s “Constitution” category for weeks now (beating my own Constitution book, of course!)
Hey, all my conservative friends who said it was just about illegal immigrants: I’m anxiously awaiting your condemnation of the Trump administration deporting US citizens, immigrants with green cards and visas, and refugees who have obeyed every immigration requirement.
Hello? Anyone there?
I see that some Republican legislatures are trying to pass laws that would prevent doctors from giving vaccines.
Next on the agenda: Imprisoning anyone who claims that the earth revolves around sun.
A look back at the State of the Union disaster
by guest blogger Ian Randal Strock
Last night, Donald Trump bloviated for an hour and 39 minutes. It was a campaign speech, it was a complaint, it was a brilliant example of verbal masturbation, Donald Trump-style. It wasn’t terribly surprising, and it wasn’t at all unifying.
It took him only eight minutes to get around to telling us that Joe Biden was “the worst president in American history.”
He gave a long list of programs he called “fraud”—which in Trump English seems to be a synonym for “programs I don’t like or disagree with”—including money for a program “in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of.” I’ve heard of it.
And he continued to threaten Panama and Greenland, saying “to enhance our national security, my administration will be reclaiming the Panama Canal.” And that the canal was built for Americans, not others. He also encouraged Greenlanders to voluntarily associate with the United States, but then said “we need Greenland for international world security. And one way or another, we’re gonna get it.”
He rambled on about many other things, but frankly, there wasn’t enough new or interesting for me to bother reporting on it again.
One thought I did take away from the speech: whether he’s read the story or not, he seems to have completely embraced the idea in my story “The Necessary Enemy.” Specifically, that it takes a villain to make a hero, that we need an enemy in order to be the victor. Perhaps that’s why he’s always talking about enemies, and why he declared a variety of emergencies the day he was inaugurated. Perhaps that’s why he’s always struggling to “make America great again,” as if someone had somehow made America less. The only one making America less is Donald Trump, as he cedes our position of economic, political, and moral leadership on the world stage.
Ian Randal Strock is a political scientist and commentator (in addition to also being a science fiction author and publisher). Keep up with him at www.IanRandalStrock.com, or on Facebook, Bluesky, and Instagram.
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